TAT : I will offer up the praise in my heart, as I pray to the end of the universe and the beginning of the beginning, to the object of man's quest, the immortal discovery, the begetter of life and truth, the sower of reason, the love of immortal life. No hidden word will be able to speak about thee, Lord. Therefore my mind wants to sing a hymn to you daily. I am the instrument of thy spirit. Mind is thy plectrum. And thy counsel plucks me. I see myself! I have received power from thee! For thy love has reached us. HERMES : Right, O my son.
(Hermetic Discourse on the Eighth & Ninth between Hermes and his pupil. 2nd cent. AD. From the Gnostic Library of Nag Hammadi).
As each new dawn raised the sun over Egypt, the victory of the light was celebrated; darkness departed and visible life returned. For Hermes, it was business as usual, for he was a god both of the night and the day, as content with the moon and the powers invisible as he was with the merchant and the sunlit groves of morning.
The cult of Hermes was already established in the Greek-speaking world before Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and founded his city, Alexandria, in 331 BC. A century later, Greek settlers in that city had begun to apply the epithet megistos kai megistos theos megas to Hermes (roughly ‘great and great the great god’ Hermes). The settlers had doubtless derived this dignity from the epithet two times great, which, for as long as anyone could remember, had been applied to Hermes' Egyptian equivalent, the god Thoth. Thoth was a mega megastar : a popular god, the supreme master of trickery, magic, writing, the realm of the dead, the moon, medicine. The Graeco-Egyptian Thoth-Hermes stood - or flew - for the very spirit of inventiveness. Fleet of foot and quick of mind, Hermes was the divine messenger. A man who spoke with a message from the gods would be regarded as being in a sense possessed by Hermes. To be inspired by the powers of Hermes was to become Hermes. In this condition, one could write in his name. The name of the game was communication.
Sometime between the first century BC and the end of the first century AD1, possibly under Jewish influence or perhaps to compete with other fashionable and venerated prophets and teachers, such as the long-since departed master-minds Zoroaster, Plato and Pythagoras, a new figure, Thrice Greatest Hermes (Hermes Trismegistos) began to appear in a series of knowledge-tracts. He appeared as an ancient patriarch of civilisation, a kind of relative of the exalted divinity, dwelling in a remote antiquity among the temples and pyramids of a pristine Egypt. Since many Greeks believed that their philosophy, especially in its spiritual aspect, derived in part from ancient Egypt, the ascendancy - or ‘rediscovery’ - of Hermes Trismegistos could be described as an astute enterprise by his literary progenitors. Having apparently overcome the test-of-time, the name Hermes could operate as a kind of intellectual designer-label.
The authority of Hermes Trismegistos was employed to dignify two main classes of writing. Firstly, a coterie of practical and theoretical lore relating to talismanic magic, astrology, astrological medicine and, notably, alchemy, and secondly, philosophical writings in dialogue-form. These latter tracts were concerned with the nature of God, man, and the cosmos. A veritable elixir, Hermes Trismegistos had an answer for everything.
Those works of Hermes which have always enjoyed the highest authority among their literary peers constitute the philosophical Hermetica, grouped together some time between c.AD 250-1050 into a body of writings now known as the Corpus Hermeticum. These texts seem to demonstrate an impatience with traditional philosophical methods and meet a hunger for a rational philosophy which could serve an essentially spiritual need. Going, they hoped, ‘one better’ than the philosophical schools, the ‘ancient’ teaching of Hermes Trismegistos was presented in the Corpus Hermeticum not as philosophical postulates in the traditional Greek sense, but as authentic revelation : ancient revelation which could be experienced by the student's identifying himself with Father Hermes' own experience, so acquiring gnosis or experiential knowledge of the spirit, making the student aware of his mind as a living fact. The texts were to operate like the Thrice Great Hermes' magical shoes : ready-made to follow in the divine footsteps - all the way to the mystical One : the journey fully vouchsafed and endorsed by centuries of assumed tradition.
Once on a time, when I had begun to think about the things that are, and my thoughts had soared high aloft, while my bodily senses had been put under restraint by sleep, - yet not such sleep as that of men weighed down by fullness of food or by bodily weariness, - methought there came to me a Being of vast and boundless magnitude, who called me by my name, and said to me, ‘What do you wish to hear and see, and to learn and come to know by thought?’ ‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘I,’ said he, ‘am Poimandres, the sovereign nous [mind].’ ‘I would fain learn,’ said I, ‘the things that are, and understand their nature, and to know God. These,’ I said, ‘are the things of which I wish to hear.’ He answered, 'I know what you wish, for indeed I am with you everywhere; keep in mind all that you desire to learn, and I will teach you.” (Libellus I. Iff. The Poimandres).
The Hermetic tradition was both moderate and flexible, offering a tolerant philosophical religion, a religion of the (omnipresent) mind, a purified perception of God, the cosmos, and the self, and much positive encouragement for the spiritual seeker, all of which the student could take anywhere. In modern parlance, much of the philosophy exposed in the tracts was ‘psychedelic’, that is to say, soul-expanding. The Hermetic experience was cosmopolitan, yet rooted in the dream of a romantic antiquity : the perfect intellectual and syncretistic cult for an Empire groping for new (and old) certainties. The Hermetic writings brought gnosis to those (perhaps youthful) pagans in search of a thoughtful and spiritual salvation from the world. For it was to Hermes, the texts informed the reader, that there had once come the ‘giants’ of a mythical past, in their youth, for instruction and initiation into the authentic, pristine cosmic philosophy. Their names were given as Tat, (King) Ammon and Asklepios. The understanding reader was invited to join the august host of that spiritual élite who had, they were led to believe, benefited from the master's authentic voice - the voice of “the authentic Nous [Mind]”- for century on imagined century.
TAT : O holy Gnosis, by thee am I illumined, and through thee do I sing praise to the noetic Light. …I rejoice in joy of mind; rejoice with me all ye Powers. .O. God, thou art the Father; O Lord, thou art Mind. HERMES : I rejoice, my son, that you are like to bring forth fruit. Out of the Truth will spring up in you the immortal generation of virtue; for by the working of mind you have come to know yourself and our Father. (Libellus XIII.18. 21.22a)
The setting of Hermetic philosophical discourse is mostly one of teacher and pupil, and both Garth Fowden and Jean-Pierre Mahé2 are convinced that this setting mirrors the situation in which the philosophical Hermetica were actually employed. That is to say that there may have existed in Egypt from about the late first century AD, schools of Hermetic discourse which aimed to take pupils to a direct experience of gnosis, combined with liturgical hymns and prayers. What inner voyager could fail to be, at least in part, seduced by the voice of a conception so abstract and timeless as the omnipresent and omniscient Mind?
Knowledge of the original pagan setting in which the texts were composed disappeared with the growth of Christianity in Egypt during the third century. From that time on, it would seem that the Hermetica represented a literary, spiritual path, divorced from the social and educational milieu of first and second century Alexandria. Anybody who could get hold of the texts could become a pupil of Hermes, or at least use his name and logia to endorse their own philosophical and religious ‘products’. The texts simply became part of the corpus of ancient authorities in matters of antique spiritual and magical knowledge - and, as with all antiques, Hermes Trismegistos' reputation would grow again in direct proportion to the rarity of the texts which bore his name.
It was no great surprise to scholars of Gnosticism, such as Professor Hans Jonas, when our earliest manuscripts of the philosophical Hermetica, including a Prayer of Thanksgiving, were found among the documents of the now famous Nag Hammadi Library of ‘Gnostic Gospels’, buried in Upper Egypt by enthusiasts of Christian gnosis in the mid to late 4th Century. Jonas had long held that the Hermetica should be seen as integral to the phenomenon of Gnostic religion. Even Christian Gnostics had found these pagan writings congenial, and perhaps inspiring in the task of creating new gnostic documents. After all, if, as S. John's Gospel declared, Christ was the divine Logos -the creative mind or ‘Word’ of God, then it was a simple matter for Christian enthusiasts of the gnosis - particularly in Alexandria - to reach the conclusion that the Christian ‘Word’ and the Hermetic ‘Nous’ were at the very least, similar in substance3.
What is the principal message of the philosophical Hermetica? Firstly, the texts announce to the reader that in order to be saved from the ebb, flow, flux and corruption of material life, it is necessary to have perfectly pure vision. The stress is always on the state of mind of the pupil; the climax of spiritual growth is always accompanied by astonishingly increased powers of perception, breaking through from material to spiritual vision. The Hermetic teaching is to enable the pupil to see aright, and to ‘see aright’ is to have acquired what Catholic doctrine calls a ‘sacramental vision’ of the created order : the world manifests a visible experience which is the expression of far greater and more profound powers invisible to the organic eye but which are seizable by the enlightened eye of the mind - called the nous, a Greek word which can mean either ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’.
While there is ‘good news’ for the Hermetic student within the tracts, the discourses are quite unlike the canonical gospels (with which the tracts perhaps competed), existing in a remote, yet ‘clear’ and timeless zone. There are no parables; there are repeated assertions of fundamental spiritual principles. There are no miracles; the cosmos is revealed as a continual miracle. There is no coercion; the pupil is free to choose the way of flesh or the way of nous. There is ultimately no master; the pupil must learn to become his own master. There is no end; it is an eternal life - the life of the aeons - which springs from the source of ‘the All’ (Pan).
The primary principle which the student of the texts is enjoined to understand is to “know thyself”. What is the essential nature of man? The Hermetic doctrine is unequivocal :
Man is a great miracle, O Asklepios, honour and reverence to such a being! Because he takes in the nature of a god as if he were himself a god; he has familiarity with the demon-kind, knowing that he issues from the same origin; he despises this part of his nature which is but human, because he puts his hope in the divinity of the other part. O what a privileged blend makes up the nature of man! He is united to the gods because he has the divinity pertaining to gods; the part of himself which is of the earth he despises in himself; all those other living things which he knows himself to be tied in the virtue of the celestial plan, he binds them by the tie of love. He raises his sights towards heaven. Such therefore is his privileged role as intermediary, loving the beings who are inferior to him and is loved by those above him. He takes the earth as his own, he blends himself with the elements by the speed of thought, by the sharpness of mind he descends to the depths of the sea. Everything is accessible to him; heaven is not too high for him, for he measures it as if it were in his grasp by his ingenuity. What sight the spirit shows to him, no mist of the air can obscure; the earth is never so dense as to impede his work; the immensity of the sea's depths do not trouble his plunging view. He is at the same time everything as he is everywhere. (Asclepius 6a. ff).
Here is an almost Edenic Man in all the fiery finery of his potential energy : airy, wise, loving, and free. The passage reads, and has been read, as a prophecy of a time when human-beings will throw off the shackle of their shadow and fear and take their place as bridges between the two worlds, seen and unseen. For the Hermetist, an intellectual appraisal of this vision of man is insufficient. One must see it for oneself; one must be reborn. The process involved here (palingenesia) purports to come from recognising, through an inner ascent experience, how far the passions of the world envelop the soul, like heavy coats of dull and dense material which hold the vision in darkness. These ‘coats’ or ‘passions’ are called “the irrational torments of matter”. The passions keep man from gnosis of his true identity.
The twelve causes of “ignorance” (agnosis) are listed as follows : ignorance itself; grief; incontinence (obsession with sex); desire; injustice; covetousness; deceitfulness; envy; fraud; anger; rashness; malice. (Libellus XIII. 7bff.) Having risen above these in the nous, the pupil comes to a vision of the “Eighth and Ninth”, beyond the control of the seven planetary spheres (which exist both within and without), and as the reborn Man - sharing in the vision of the original Anthropos (Humanity as pristine archetypal principle), who, according to Libellus I's account of the Fall into irrational Nature, fell into his reflection in the waters of the earth - the reborn one perceives “not with bodily eyesight, but by the energy of nous”.
HERMES : Even so it is, my son, when a man is born again; it is no longer body of three dimensions that he perceives, but the incorporeal. TAT : Father, now that I see in mind, I see myself to be the All. I am in heaven and in earth, in water and in air; I am in beasts and plants; I am a babe in the womb, and one that is not yet conceived, and one that has been born; I am present everywhere. (Libellus XIII. Treatise on Rebirth)
It should be understood that while this Hermetic vision of spiritual life combined with abundant nature was intended to have universal applications - and indeed has achieved this historically - there is a serious strain in the philosophical Hermetica of rooting the vision within the magical and devout land of Egypt herself. Egypt had a mystique to western antiquity which while undoubtedly dimming to the vaguest flicker of antique fire at the end of the Roman Empire, (when she was repeatedly invaded by hostile forces from the east), nonetheless returned with great vigour in the fifteenth century Renaissance and has never since left the European scene. In fact, the rebirth of the Egyptian mystique during the Renaissance was precisely due to the re-appearance in the west of once-lost Hermetic writings -the bulk of the Corpus Hermeticum - which were then joined to extant Latin translations such as this powerful lament for a disappearing world, composed between c.260 and 310 AD:
Or are you ignorant, O Asklepios, that Egypt is the image of heaven? Moreover it is the dwelling place of heaven and all the forces that are in heaven. If it is proper for us to speak the truth, our land is the temple of the world. And it is proper for you not to be ignorant that a time will come when Egyptians will seem to have served the divinity in vain, and all their activity in their religion will be despised. For all divinity will leave Egypt and will flee upward to heaven. And Egypt will be widowed; it will be abandoned by the gods. For foreigners will come into Egypt and they will rule it. Egypt! Moreover, Egyptians will be prohibited from worshipping God. Furthermore, they will come into the ultimate punishment, especially whoever among them is found worshipping and honouring God. And in that day the country that was more pious than all countries will become impious. No longer will it be full of temples, but it will be full of tombs. Neither will it be full of gods, but it will be full of corpses. O Egypt! …And the barbarian will be better than you, O Egyptian, in his religion, whether he is a Scythian, or the Hindus, or some other of this sort. …And Egypt will be made a desert by the gods and the Egyptians. And as for you, O River, there will be a day when you will flow with blood more than water. And dead bodies will be stacked higher than the dams. And he who is dead will not be mourned as much as he who is alive. …And in that day the world will not be marvelled at… it will be despised - the beautiful world of God, the incomparable work, the energy which possesses goodness, the many-formed vision, the abundance that does not envy, that is full of every vision. Darkness will be preferred to light and death will be preferred to life. No one will gaze into heaven. And the pious man will be counted as insane, and the impious man will be honoured as wise. The man who is afraid will be considered as strong. And the good man will be punished like a criminal.
This speech motivated at least one Renaissance philosopher (Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600) to attempt to rebuild the vision of the imaginary Egypt described in the text. He hoped (mistakenly) to revive the essence of (Egyptian) magical religion within the Catholic Church: an eirenic exercise which he hoped would lead to the reuniting of Christendom about the principle of the Hermetic One. His beliefs would find a following in the Age of Reason - which, for a number of its (frequently masonic) exponents, was hoped to mean an Age of Nous.
The precise provenance of the philosophical Hermetica remains to a large extent a mystery. Certainly a number of disparate authors between the late first and third centuries were involved in the production of the texts, not all by any means of identical philosophic leanings; contradictions abound. The passage above seems to have been written by somebody with a deep reverence for Egypt as a place where pure philosophy had been taught and right worship had been offered to the gods since the beginnings of mankind, and is full of that hearty disdain for foreign cultures familiar to all those who had invaded Egypt in the past. However, the language of the texts is Greek (with no obvious intrinsic signs of having been a translation) and it may be wondered why a devout follower of Thoth-Hermes in Egypt should want non-Egyptians to know the philosophical lore of his country, if they were so unworthy of it. Furthermore, it is to be doubted whether the reader is in fact receiving such philosophic lore. The cosmic picture of the philosophical Hermetica conforms in the main to a number of doctrines familiar to students of Plato, the neo-Pythagoreans, the Stoics, the Septuagint and the Middle Platonists, while the underlying bid of the texts may be to the effect that the Greeks derived (imperfectly) their doctrines from the Egyptians in the first place. There is a want of technical Egyptian mythological, liturgical and sacerdotal knowledge in the texts. We really learn nothing about Egyptian religion, except in the most general terms, terms which would not stretch the vocabulary gained by the average reader of a tourist-guide to ancient Egypt today. In many ways we can see the philosophical Hermetica as having been ‘made in Egypt for export’ - and made almost certainly by highly Hellenized, but nonetheless rather peculiar Egyptians whose intellectual home was the great city of Alexandria.
However, there are characteristics within the philosophical Hermetica which are, at least in their combination, unique to the corpus. The first factor which strikes the modern reader is the imaginative power of many of the texts. We have an attractive array of similes, stories, and passages of poetic and rhetorical strength, whose inner consistency suggests the presence of clear and brilliantly communicative minds operating behind them. Particularly memorable are the opening of Hermes' mind to the “authentic nous” and subsequent vision in libellus I, the story of the herald and the krater (bowl) of nous in libellus IV, the discourse on rebirth in libellus XIII, the treatise on ‘Man the Marvel’ in Asclepius I, and the lament for a lost Egypt in Asclepius III. These passages, among others, have stimulated scholars, poets and religious teachers for nearly two millennia and cannot simply be written off as hodge-podges of contemporary philosophical commonplaces. Dr. Fowden4 maintains that there was a distinct spiritual path taught in Roman Egypt which one could describe as a ‘Way of Hermes’, which might be undertaken either exclusively or as part of a broader religious and philosophical study. One might be able to talk of a culture of ‘Hermetists’, possibly pursuing their pagan (if philosophically, but not mythologically, monotheist) light in secret after the domination of Christianity in Egypt and the closure of pagan temples in the late fourth century. There can be little doubt that the texts could have been employed as part of a polemic to the effect of saying that the pagan intellectual had nothing serious to learn from Christian ideas of the goodness of God or his creative and redemptive power.5 Certainly the texts survived in the few places where pagan philosophy survived after the fall of the western Roman Empire and even after the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the 630's, as we shall see. And here we come to another peculiarity of the Hermetic philosophical texts.
I have alluded earlier to the ‘universal’ quality of the Corpus Hermeticum. The Hermetica have been used by both Christian and Muslim scholars to support their contentions. Hermes has even been seen as a prophet of Christianity (for example, by the theologian Lactantius6) since Hermes' writings refer to God having a Son, and because Hermes was thought to have lived before Moses. The Hermetica are full of injunctions to be pious towards God, who is called the “Father” and the “Good” and other soubriquets consistent with the Christian revelation. God is incorporeal and contains all things within himself : “it is as thoughts which God thinks, that all things are contained in him.” (libellus Xiii.20a). God is One : the maker and sustainer of all. The sin of mankind is that they fail to see things as they are, and are thus brought to stumbling, because they do not see what is around them. God gave the nous to man to enlighten him, but many forego its light because they prefer the things of the body of sense to the subtle world of the unseen. This doctrine would not be out of place in the Prologue to S. John's Gospel wherein we are told that the divine logos made the world, was in the world, but the world knew him not. The Hermetic writings set a very high store on the idea of knowledge, of gnosis. They are, after all, books of knowledge. The important thing is to know God, then all good and loving insights will follow and man will see himself as he really is, and how close to the source of All (Pan) he is. It is at this point perhaps that the Hermetic writings would suggest impiety to some orthodox, and especially unlearned, Christians.
The milieu of the Hermetic philosophical tractates is undoubtedly one informed by the intellectual (and in some cases anti-intellectual) revolution known (in Christian theology) as Gnosticism, which in various forms began to be accreted to the Church almost as soon as the Gospel left Palestine, and which was to proceed in the second century to flourish and luxuriate in the wildest imaginable forms of syncretistic magic. But the gnosis of the Hermetic writings is both pious and simple, devoid of the panoply of mythological baggage which haunted some of the numerous coteries of Christian Gnostics in the second century. The gnosis of the Hermetica is rooted in the most optimistic picture possible of human potential. One can almost describe its flavour as innocent, coming, as was believed, from a pristine past of unspoilt people :
If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal [ie : use your imagination], and make yourself grow to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time, and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and every science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights, and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God. But if you shut up your soul in your body [or fail to use your imagination], and abase yourself, and say ‘I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be’, then, what have you to do with God? Your thought can grasp nothing beautiful and good, if you cleave to the body, and are evil.
For it is the height of evil not to know God; but to be capable of knowing God, and to wish and hope to know him, is the road which leads straight to the Good; and it is an easy road to travel. Everywhere God will come to meet you, everywhere he will appear to you, at places and times at which you look not for it, in your waking hours and in your sleep, when you are journeying by water and by land, in the night-time and in the day-time, when you are speaking and when you are silent; for there is nothing in which God is not. And do you say ‘God is invisible’? Speak not so. Who is more manifest than God? For this very purpose has he made all things, that through all things you may see him. This is God's goodness, that he manifests himself through all things. Nothing is invisible, not even an incorporeal thing; nous is seen in its thinking, and God in his working.
So far, thrice greatest one, [says Nous], I have shown you the truth. Think out all else in like manner for yourself, and you will not be misled. (Libellus XIii. 20b-22b. A discourse of Mind [Nous] to Hermes).
It is still unclear as to what part, if any, Hermetic ideas played in the development of Christian Gnosticism, and such Christian philosophy as existed in Alexandria in the second and third centuries (though the works of Clement of Alexandria show some interpenetration of idea). It is also unknown as to what, if any, part was played by Christian doctrines in the formation of the philosophical Hermetica. While there are similarities of idea - especially as regards an aesthetic pantheism (see especially the Gospel of Thomas) and the need for gnosis of God - between the Corpus Hermeticum and the largely Christian Gnostic material of the Nag Hammadi Library, there is, overall, a marked difference in both tone and pitch. The libelli of Hermes Trismegistos are marked by a tranquil, genial tone of gravitas and contemplative ease, quite in contrast to the often hurried, intense, obscure, riddle-drenched barrage of pedantic and hieratic restlessness characteristic of some of the Christian Gnostic literary material. Eclectic Valentinian works such as the Gospel of Philip, for example, may appear to the unsympathetic as a parable gone mad. The Hermetic world, by contrast, is a good deal simpler, giving the impression of a time “when the world was a little younger.” It is a charmed world. In retrospect, it is just as well that Hermetists and Christian Gnostics seem to have kept their distance. Had Christian Gnosticism entered into the Hermetic corpus, the chances are that we should have heard no more of its unique timbre after the fourth century AD. As it was, the words of Hermes - rare as they were - were destined to traverse the thoughts of scholars in both east and west for centuries to come, and though divorced from their original sitz in leben, continued to evoke an eternal fantasy-land of cool philosophy and spiritual awakening forever basking in the shadow of the inscrutable sphinx while the evergreen adept's feet dangled gently in an imaginary Nile.
It was the fate of the Hermetic philosophical writings to be regarded as ancient authorities : a kind of litmus-test to what was authentic (ie : ancient - and pristine) in philosophy. This usage of Hermes can first be glimpsed among certain writings emanating from the Neoplatonists. Schools of Neoplatonic thought flourished during and after the lifetime of the Egyptian philosopher Plotinus (b.204), and since Plotinus' followers took the Hermetic corpus to be of very ancient provenance, these writings would themselves add to Hermes' tremendous reputation among scholars in the Middle Ages, for a significant portion of the ancient philosophy available to the Middle Ages was in fact Neoplatonic - though sometimes attributed (incorrectly) to Aristotle or Plato. This situation came about largely because the origin of much of the western philosophical tradition (after the 9th century) was to be located in translation-houses based in Harran and Baghdad, preoccupied with scientific and (inseparably) magical knowledge; Neoplatonic philosophy provided the rational basis for much magical practice. And where there was magic, the enchanting reputation of Hermes was never far away.
While Plotinus, the chief progenitor of Neoplatonic philosophy, was critical of the value of magic in purifying the soul, we nevertheless read in Plotinus' pupil Porphyry's life of his master, an account of how the great man was subjected to a magical bewitchment at the hands of one Olympius. Olympius was, like both Plotinus and the great Christian theologian Origen, a pupil of the Alexandrian master Ammonius Saccas; he was not a vulgar sorcerer, and even though Porphyry's opinion of Olympius was low, the event testifies pointedly to the mélange of ideas and practices which surrounded the Neoplatonic schools. We know that works found in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Library were almost certainly read by associates of Plotinus, and doubtless with approval7, an approval which led Plotinus to condemn the radical Gnostic notion of a violent rift between the natural and spiritual worlds. While Plotinus made it his business to ‘cleanse’ his philosophy of unharmonious elements, the attitude of Neoplatonists to magic was in truth ambivalent. Magic, Neoplatonic mysticism and gnosis were inextricably linked - though not at all points. The works of Plotinus' followers Porphyry, Iamblichus (c.250-335) and Proclus (410-485) show this mutual interpenetration of ideas very clearly.
In the very first line of Iamblichus' de mysteriis, the primacy of Hermetic wisdom is asserted directly :
Hermes, the god who presides over learning, has for long been rightly regarded as common to all priests : he who presides over true knowledge [gnosis] about the gods is one and the same, whatever the circumstances. It was to him too that our ancestors dedicated the fruits of their wisdom, by placing all their own writings under his name.
Iamblichus claimed to have found his doctrine of passifying the demons of the soul (to neutralise the passions of the body) in the Hermetic books, where the liberation of the soul from the bonds of Fate, (that is : the star-demons), was many times described. Iamblichus was convinced that the Hermetic writings, while having been translated into Greek by those familiar with Greek philosophy, had their origins in the ancient Thoth (=Hermes) literature : the pristine wisdom of the East.
The late-antique Neoplatonists did have problems in dealing with the demonology or vulgar magic (goetia) of some Hermetic writings, an abiding problem which seems to have been due to the fact that magic in its intellectual phase bore within it essentially gnostic characteristics, and while it was the inherent gnosis of the Hermetica which appealed to the Neoplatonists, magic and gnosis were really inseparable. It is clear that gnostic theory in its primitive state derived much of its mythological and technical ‘equipment’ from the ancient magical theories of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Indeed, a gnosis without magical quality would be a pretty anaemic affair.
In spite of the magical context in which Neoplatonist and Hermetic works would often come to be received, the more philosophical texts were nonetheless devoid of obvious magical references, being pious, revealing a God beyond magic, a God to be worshipped in silence and thanksgiving, beyond Fate (the zodiacal heimarmene or ‘night-cloak’). In Corpus Hermeticum XIII.8. and in the text called The Ogdoad reveals the Ennead, the access of the divine power, experienced as ‘light’, is immediately preceded by an embrace between master and pupil, a sign of divine love and mutual thanksgiving. This gnosis of God, according to the Hermetic tradition, enabled the aspirant to step onto the moving ladder which passed through the created cosmos directly to the life at its heart.
Iamblichus' idea of the practice of Theurgy - a set of rituals involving the pacification of the controlling demons of the material realm, also took from the Hermetists the cult practices of praying in the pure temple, praying at the setting and the rising of the sun, and the singing of hymns. Iamblichus also took the view from the Hermetic texts that once one had penetrated the seven spheres of Fate (the realm of astrology), magic ceased to be necessary : a compromise view which attempted to reconcile Theurgic magic with the pure philosophy of which Plotinus approved. Theurgic rites represented a preparation for eventual illumination, but were not to be identified with that illumination; man stood between two worlds, though these worlds were not in any way sundered : Theurgy was for the lower world; pure philosophy was for - and from - the higher. The classic sorcerer was seen as one addicted to the hidden powers of the lower world with little or no interest in the exalted spiritual philosophy. Herein lies the perennial ambivalence regarding the role of magic in western religion.
The beliefs of the Theurgists, handed over to the western Middle Ages by the Sabians of Harran and Baghdad, preserved the realisation that man could be a free agent within a divine cosmos, that he could engage directly with cosmic powers, that he shared in the being of the primal man, called Phos (=Light), that he was in potentia a being of light closed in a shell, and that man, like the gods which lived within him was endowed with immortality and the spark of gnosis, which if used properly could bring him out of a world of constraint and darkness into a world of freedom, love, light and truth. This optimistic picture was necessarily held discretely, not least since it stood in head-on collision with the Catholic Church's concept of original sin and purgatorial redemption. Hermes was an uncomfortable guest at the Church's festive board.